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Freshdesk Review
The gold standard for easy, customer-facing service desks that are simple to use
THE BOTTOM LINE
Freshdesk is the industry standard for help desk software for small enterprises. It's an obvious choice for Editors' Choice once again, thanks to multiple price levels and a consistent user experience.
+ via a question-based query tool Smaller customers can use the free tier to gain a feel for the system over time.
+ Younger customer care agents will be interested in the gamification function.
CONS
- Younger Only the beta version has high-eng analytic features.
- Many advanced features necessitate an upgrade to the most expensive pricing tiers.
FRESHDESK SPECS
| Asset Management | No |
| Tickets From Social Media | Yes |
| Remote Control | No |
| Knowledge Base | Yes |
| Self-Service Portal | Yes |
| Smartphone Apps | No |
| Support Widget | Yes |
| Live Chat | Yes |
| Chatbot Support | Yes |
| Custom Reporting | Yes |
In our reviews over the previous few years, Freshdesk has regularly ranked at the top of our help desk competitors. Freshdesk is a small business-focused platform created by Freshworks that contrasts with the company's larger version, Freshservice. The app has a number of features geared at offering customer support as fast and conveniently as feasible. Customers become irritated when they do not receive the support they require in a timely manner or when a problem takes too long to resolve. Freshdesk does an excellent job of reducing friction on numerous fronts in this regard. Freshdesk, along with partner SMB Freshdesk, is an Editors' Choice winner this time around, thanks to more advanced features like gamification and various touchpoint channels. Freshdesk, along with rival SMB challenger Zoho Desk, is an Editors' Choice winner this time around, because of more advanced features like gamification and various touchpoint channels.
Freshdesk Pricing and Plans
Freshdesk Plans and Pricing Blossom, Garden, Estate, and Forest are the Freshdesk pricing tiers. The Sprout plan is still free for unlimited agents with a minimal set of capabilities, such as managing tickets sent via phone, email, or social media (albeit this requires integration with Freshcaller) (Facebook and Twitter). Basic automation and access to both an internal and public knowledge base are also included in the free edition. Customers with location-sensitive requirements can select the data center where their Freshdesk instance will be hosted by Freshworks.
Blossom provides collision detection and traffic cop features for $15 per agent per month, which means it may prohibit several agents from reacting to the same ticket or one agent from responding without viewing updated ticket information. Advanced automation and workflow, bespoke ticket displays, basic SLA management, and integrations through the Freshworks Marketplace are among the other capabilities.
Since our last evaluation, the Garden level has experienced a pricing hike of $35 per agent each month. This package includes time tracking, ticket templates, customer satisfaction surveys, canned forms, escalation emails for SLA violations, and "customer 360" features, as well as time tracking, ticket templates, customer satisfaction surveys, canned forms, and escalation emails for SLA violations. These allow you to examine whatever knowledge base articles a client has seen inside the context of a ticket, as well as any information you've previously gathered about the customer in earlier tickets.
Customized customer satisfaction surveys, advanced ticket assignment methods (round-robin and load-balanced), shared ticket ownership, multiple SLA policies, dynamic ticket forms, support for multiple products, and Freddy, Freshdesk's AI engine, are all included in Estate's $49 per agent per month price. Freddy is a one-stop-shop for integrating bot-focused client touchpoints such as bot-powered voice chat and smart, phone-based IVR systems.
Forest's top tier has seen its pricing drop to $99 per agent every month. HIPAA compliance and IP whitelists for both customers and agents are additional features. Mobile apps for Apple iOS and Google Android are available at all pricing levels.
While it's competitive with enterprise platforms like Vivantio, Freshdesk's price increases this time put it on the pricier end of small-business solutions. For example, Zoho Desk, another Editors' Choice winner for small businesses, has a similar pricing structure as Freshdesk, including a free edition. Standard, the lowest-paid tier, costs $14 per agent each month, which is comparable to Freshdesk. However, compared to Freshdesk's Garden tier, which now costs $35 per agent per month, its mid-level tier, Professional, costs only $23 per agent each month. While Freshdesk remains economical for its small business target demographic, there are less expensive alternatives if your budget is limited.
A Friendly UI With Some Unique Features
Gorgias focuses on e-commerce platforms, while Freshdesk focuses on helping external customers. The software focuses on using bots to automate as much of the customer service experience as possible. In a customer-facing situation, chatbots and self-service portals can handle a large percentage of the most common support requests. Gamification, a common add-on to help take the boring out of a standard customer support agent's day, is also a popular feature of the platform. Freshdesk Arcade is the name of this function, and it's one of the few areas where Freshdesk stands out. Leaderboards for ticket resolution and badges for top performers and agents who complete unique objectives are available in Arcade. You may also tweak Arcade to select what point values are granted (or deducted) for particular occurrences, such as ticket resolution in under an hour, problems handled within the SLA-defined time frame, or point deductions for late resolutions.
The opportunity for each user to personalize their Freshdesk dashboard so that it displays the information that is most essential to them is a fantastic feature that you won't find in some of its competitors. This customizable dashboard displays a mix of visuals and numeric statistics ranging from the number of tickets in the queue for that particular user to time slice trends indicating the most common problems consumers call about. Team dashboards can also provide the same level of flexibility for a specific user group.
Another option to cut down on the time it takes to respond to frequently requested queries is to use canned responses. Freshdesk has a feature called templating that allows you to pre-fill information based on previous interactions with a particular customer.
Freshdesk includes a number of different integrations in addition to the Freshcaller hook for handling phone calls. Google Workspace, Slack, Zapier, and others are among them. You'll need to go to the Freshworks Marketplace, which has over 300 different application connectors, for a complete list.
While it isn't as focused on e-commerce as Gorgias, the Marketplace does include integrations for apps like Shopify and PayPal, as well as Stripe for payment processing. Those connectors could bring Freshdesk up to par with Gorgias if you're prepared to design some unique workflows. Freshworks is aiming for maximum flexibility here, so you can create any support desk your company needs. Although you'll still have to put in some effort, the Marketplace's size is a positive step in the right direction.
Two-factor authentication and Field Service Management are two new characteristics we discovered during this round of testing. Two-factor authentication, which works by QR code on a mobile device, is a nice addition to Freshdesk's security features. Field Service Management enables you to manage any service technicians who are out in the field visiting clients. This module connects your field technicians' names to a scheduling tool that runs on iOS or Android, allowing them to communicate using normal mobile devices.
Freshdesk Ticket Management
Examining a help desk platform's core functionality entails looking at how it handles incoming and completed trouble tickets. Freshdesk uses search to help you quickly locate tickets based on status indicators like open and pending, overdue, urgent, high priority, and others. Whether you're shopping for your own tickets or managing a much larger pool aimed at your team, this makes navigating through a long list of tickets much easier. You may also search tickets by filtering on custom category fields that are specific to your business or product if you've set them up.
We discovered that adding those custom fields was quite simple. For this purpose, Freshdesk offers a really user-friendly drag-and-drop editor that allows you to add, delete, relocate, and label new fields as you see appropriate. It's automatic to map them to the appropriate fields in your tickets.
You can also put scenarios into action. These are saved action groups that contain multiple actions that Freshdesk will complete automatically. Scenarios can determine the priority, type of problem, and status of a ticket. It could also allocate a ticket to a specific agent, agent type, or group of agents. You can use these cached views to filter your search results based on common criteria instead of having to manually filter the results each time.
A three-panel arrangement can be found inside each ticket. The first panel includes high-level ticket information as well as a history of client interactions or ticket remarks. Property information is found in panel two, which includes items like a resolution due date, tags, status, priority, and assignment details. Customer contact information, agent time records, and a to-do list are displayed on the last screen.
Freshworks includes productivity options as well. These allow you to automate the handling of new tickets. Dispatch is the name of the automated response system. It's one of the more complicated parts of Freshdesk that we came across throughout our testing, but once you figure it out, it's pretty much "set and forget." Any automation you create this way are rule-based, relying on conditions and actions to carry out tasks without the need for manual intervention. The observer is another rule-based automation tool that can monitor specific user kinds' actions. The supervisor, a third assistant, can keep track of tickets that haven't been touched in a while and take action.
The Supervisor function does an hourly check to see if any tickets haven't been updated in 30 days to guarantee your team doesn't fall behind. To view, escalate, and resolve these tickets, you can set up automated answers. On a similar point, response templates can be used to resolve outgoing tickets for common requests. There is over 100 ticket-resolution automation available out of the box.
Freshdesk's top-tier Forest version provides a higher-end capability that allows your admins to test any ticketing process configuration changes you make. Testing takes place in a sandbox view, which allows you to evaluate how any changes will affect your production system before deploying them. Once you've finished testing, you can release the updates all at once or in stages.
Reporting and Exporting Data
At the time of writing, Freshdesk features a new analytics section that is still in beta. This will, however, eventually take the place of the current reporting section. The new module focuses on finding patterns and trends that would otherwise go unnoticed in a prepared report. This is in addition to the existing reporting module, which currently provides intelligent reporting based on specific queries.
The current reporting function allows you to ask single queries ("What was John Smith's average initial response time last month?") and obtain replies in a graphical manner. Simply by expanding on your questions, you can create your own reports. Start with "How many," and the system will give you options like "tickets were resolved," "tickets were received," or "tickets were reopened." Additional phrases show when you click one of the alternatives, allowing you to get as specific as you want without needing to know what data you're attempting to surface ahead of time. This makes basic reporting duties really intuitive, and it's a feature that few rivals offer. However, if you want to do more advanced reporting, you'll almost certainly need to use a third-party application. For users who want to do advanced analysis, it leaves a lot to be desired.
You should look into scheduled ticket exports for this. These can be used to create JSON files containing ticket events in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). These can be emailed or made available through API, and then imported into a variety of BI tools for further analysis.
A Fantastic Help Desk Platform for Small Business
Freshdesk is still a clear leader for small firms that require customer-style problem-solving. It isn't designed for internal help desks, where functions such as change management, asset management, and project management are required. ITIL-compatible solutions, such as Freshdesk's sister app, Freshservice, are ideal for this. If high-end internal features like those aren't what you're looking for, you'll struggle to find a solution as capable and user-friendly as Freshdesk.
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